executive knowledge lines november 2012

2Executive Knowledge LinesNovember 2012

November 2012Executive Knowledge Lines3

Editor’s Desk

1 November ’[email protected]

'You cannot manage what you cannot measure'- Phil Murphy

This old management paradigm has been proven amply true in all facets of human activity. Starting from the simple act of managing personal money at hand to running large organizations, measurement is a pre-requisite for efficient handling of affairs.

The world, we live in, is getting more and more complex and enterprises, be they industries or businesses or institutions of learn-ing, are all challenged from every angle, posing threat to the very operations or even existence. Disruptive innovations surfacing in every sector add further problems to hitherto well run organizations. Naturally, there is an urgent need for those at the helm of affairs to monitor and measure the outputs and all related entities, continu-ously benchmarking them against standards. For example, an auto-mobile manufacturer cannot simply churn out a new model, without assessing the customer segment likely to welcome the new entrant.

In another scenario, a small street-corner shop owner has at his finger tips the stock of items he is holding at any time. But when it comes to large traders, the situation is different and for handling the affairs resorting to back of the envelope notings may not be enough. It would call for computing power to monitor or measure various entities which may include manpower, their outputs, materials in stock, competitors' data and a host of such other information. Thanks to various technologies aiding this process, measurements are possible today by the stakeholders from anywhere in the planet. Electronic labels like RFID, various sensors, cameras, etc. well connected by the Internet for monitoring through handheld wireless devices like smartphones or tablets are there to depend upon.

Now the other side of the story: while most of the required elements can be ceremoniously measured and gainfully utilized for business purposes, there are a number of activities not amenable

to measurement but are to be handled in spite of the limitations. One such case is that of customer

satisfaction, not quantifiable in absolute values. Such intangible areas also have to be handled along with the measurable ones to run an organization ensuring sustainable growth.

The challenge in front is thus multi-pronged and, of course, manageable.

N T Nair, Trivandrum


Nature Lines

Kiwi FruitExotic and Global

Kiwi is an exotic fruit which is the national fruit of China and hence is referred to as Chinese gooseberry. Popularly known as kiwi in many parts of the world, it is the edible berry of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa and hybrids between this and other species in the genus Actinidia. It is indigenous to the eastern Chinese Shaanxi province. In China, kiwi fruits are named "macaque peach". Other species of Actinidia are native to India, Japan and southeastern Siberia. Cultivation spread from China in the early 20th Century, when seeds were taken to New Zealand.

The most common variety of kiwifruit is oval in shape, about the size of a hen's egg. It has a fibrous, dull brown-green skin and bright green or golden flesh with plenty of tiny, black, edible seeds. The fruit has a soft texture and a sweet but unique flavour. The popular variety of Actinidia deliciosa 'Hayward' was developed in New Zealand around 1924. It was initially grown in domestic gardens, but commercial planting began in the 1940s in several countries, such as Italy, New Zealand, Chile, Greece and France. Italy is now the leading producer of kiwifruit in the world, followed by New Zealand, Chile, France,


Greece, Japan and the USA. The world production of kiwifruit in 2007 totalled 1160 thousand metric tons with major producers: Italy – 410, New Zealand – 360, Chile – 170, France – 80, Greece – 40, Japan – 40, and USA – 20.

Fruits are ripened to eat when they yield to gentle pressure. To consume these fruits raw, they are used as appetizers, in fish, salads, fowl and meat dishes, puddings, pies, and prepared as cake-filling. As a combination of banana, strawberry and pineapple in taste, the fruit offers a wide variety of health promoting nutrients such as phyto-chemicals, minerals and vitamins. Sliced kiwifruit has long been regularly used as a garnish atop whipped cream on New Zealand's national dessert, the pavlova. It can also be used in curry. Nutritional and Health Benefits

Kiwifruit is a rich source of vitamin C. It is low in saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol. It also contains vitamin E, and a small amount of vitamin A. They help fight against the damage caused by the free radicals in the body. Free radicals have demolishing effect on the cells and are responsible for early aging signs as well as various illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. The skin is a good source of flavonoid antioxidants. The kiwifruit seed oil contains on average 62% alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid. Usually a medium size kiwifruit contains about 46 calories of energy, 3 g fat, 1 g protein, 11 g carbohydrates, 6 grams of sugar, and 2.6 g dietary fiber, found partly in the edible skin. Kiwifruit is often reported to have mild laxative effects, due to its significant levels of dietary fiber.

Kiwifruit is a natural source of carotenoids, such as provitamin A, beta-carotene, lutein and zeaxanthin. Raw kiwifruit is rich in the protein-dissolving enzyme actinidin, which is commercially useful as a meat tenderizer, but can be an allergen for people allergic to bananas, papayas or pineapples. The fruit also contains calcium oxalate crystals in the form of raphides, and is a rich source of minerals such as magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron and copper.

Studies have indicated that eating three or more servings of fruit in a day can decrease the risk of developing an eye-related disease named Age Related Macular Degeneration (ARMD) up to 36%. Studies in Italy, though, performed on 6-7 year old children, have also demonstrated additional health benefits to the respiratory tract. In particular, children who were fed 5-7 portions a week of citrus and


kiwifruits had 44% less probability of wheezing compared to children eating less than once a week. This result is traceable not only to the content of Vitamin C or Potassium, but of substances which are still largely unknown, contained in kiwifruit. These substances are most likely flavonoids that help protect our cells from oxidative damage, and are therefore considered very helpful in protecting our DNA from mutations and damage.

Kiwifruit components, possibly involving vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids from its numerous edible seeds, have potential properties of a natural blood thinner. A study performed at the University of Oslo in Norway reported, consuming two to three kiwifruit daily for 28 days significantly reduced platelet aggregation and blood triglyceride levels, potentially reducing the risk of blood clots.

Owing to its nutritional value and health benefits, kiwi fruit is ideal for weight loss and good general health. Dietary fibers of the kiwi fruit have been proved to reduce the cholesterol level in the body. The required sodium to potassium ratio for a healthy heart is present in the kiwifruit. Kiwi also contains inositol, a natural occurring sugar alcohol that may have a positive effect to regulate diabetes.

Consumption of kiwi fruit makes metabolism stronger and prevents wheezing and coughing, particularly in children. It can also strengthen the immune system of the body helping fight cold and flu. The folate content in kiwi helps cell development of foetus in pregnant women. An anti mutagenic component present in kiwifruit helps prevent the mutations of DNA causing development of cancer.

[CGS]

The Butterfly EffectLove is always patient and kind. It is never jealous.

Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but

delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

- Nicholas Sparks


Environment Lines

The term 'green building' is synonymous with 'high performance building', 'sustainable design and construction' as well as other terms that refer to a holistic approach to design and construction. It refers to a structure and using process that is environmentally responsible and resource - efficient throughout a building's life cycle: from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and demolition. This practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability and comfort.

TERI, a not-for-profit organization working in the field of sustainable development defines it as,

"A green building is designed, constructed and operated to minimize the total environmental impacts while enhancing user comfort and productivity".

The Indian Green Building Council provides the following definition- ' A green building is one which uses less water, optimizes energy efficiency, conserves natural resources, generates less waste and provides healthier spaces for occupants as compared to a conventional building.'

The following is a list of some green buildings in India based on the LEED India ratings:1. Suzlon Energy Limited, Pune.2. Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd., Bangalore3. Olympia Technology Park, Chennai4. ITC Green Centre, Gurgaon5. The Druk White Lotus School, Ladakh6. La Cuisine Solaire,Auroville7. Doon School, Dehradun8. Rain tree Hotels, Chennai9. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad.10. Nokia,Gurgaon.

Green Building design strives to balance environmental responsibility, resource efficiency, occupant comfort and well being and community sensitivity.

The basic prerequisites for green buildings are:-a. Climate based layouts and designs to minimize energy consumption.b. Waste water treatment and recycling with zero discharge to outside.c. Fly ash blocks can be used for walls and slabs. This will maximize

use of recycled material.

Green Buildings Promoting Sustainable Construction


d. Maximize natural lighting and ensure optimum indoor air quality.In fact, a sampling of green building practices shows its importance

in sustainable construction:-1. Sitinga. Protecting and retaining existing landscaping and natural features.b. Recycled content paving materials, furnishings and mulches help

close the recycling loop.2. Energy Efficiency a. Passive design strategies can dramatically affect building energy

performance. These measures include building shape and orientation, passive solar design etc.

b. Developing strategies to provide natural lighting. It has a positive impact on productivity and well-being.

c. Installing high-efficiency lighting systems with advanced lighting controls. Including motion sensors tied to dimmable lighting controls. Task lighting reduces general overhead light levels.

d. Considering alternative energy sources such as photovoltaics and fuel cells and using computer modelling in optimizing design of electrical and mechanical systems and the building shell.

3. Materials EfficiencySelection of sustainable construction and products by evaluating

several characteristics such as reused and recycled content, zero or low off gassing of harmful air emissions, zero or low toxicity, sustain ably harvested materials, high recyclability, durability, longevity and local production. Such products promote resource conservation and efficiency.4. Water Efficiencya. Design for dual plumbing to use recycled water for toilet flushing

or a gray water system that recovers rain water or other non potable water for site irrigation.

b. Minimize waste water by using ultra low-flush toilets, low- flow shower heads and other water conserving fixtures.

c. Use recirculating systems for centralized hot water distribution.d. Install point -of-use hot water heating system for more distant

locations .e. Use a water budget approach that schedules irrigation using the

California Irrigation Management Information System data for Landscaping.

f. Meter the landscape separately from building. Use micro-irrigation (which excludes sprinklers and high pressure sprayers) to supply water in non turf areas.

g. Use state-of-the-art irrigation controllers and self closing nozzles on hoses.


Thus the concept of green building offers the following advantages:-a. Environment friendlyb. Energy Efficientc. Water conservationd. Fire safetye. Excellent indoor air quality.

Some of the key attributes of sustainable buildings are:-a. Consideration of sustainability aspects in all phases of building,

design and planning as well as during construction and production of building materials.

b. Use of healthy and environmentally friendly building materials and products.

c. Use of efficient systemsd. Use of constructions and systems which are easy to maintain and

service.e. Safeguarding of high functionality, flexibility and adaptability and

of health and comfort of uses, occupiers and visitors.f. high aesthetic and urban design quality and high public acceptance.g. appropriate location with good access to public transportation

services and net works.Thus the concept of green building is essentially based on the

premise that economic development and urbanization need not go against the flow of nature, which no doubt is the bed rock of sustainable construction practices.

[Dr Raju Narayana Swamy IAS, Ph.D.Commissioner, Civil Supplies, Kerala]

The modern life style with more attachment to electronic gadgets and fast food culture is creating a serious threat on health condition. One such emerging epidemic is obesity. Obesity is the accumulation of extra fat on adipose tissue, which results due to the consumption of more calories than actually needed. Naturally a question arising over here is, why you overeat? To answer such a question, let’s have a look on the normal body metabolism. Every human being requires a state of energy balance to have a healthy living. Energy is produced from the food we eat. Based on the amount of food intake, a right amount

Leptin Science Why We Overeat?

Food Lines


of calories should be burned off for normal physique. The smooth progress of metabolism is maintained in our body by two hormones called Ghrelin and Leptin. Ghrelin is produced by stomach and it says, “Give me food, I’m hungry”. The mission of ghrelin is to send a message stating “you need to charge up the energy”. On the other hand, leptin is a hormone secreted by fat cells and it says “Stop eating, I’ve had enough”. It communicates with the brain that “You have sufficient energy”. Obesity occurs, when consumption of food is more than that burned off. People who are overweight have more fat, which means more leptin is produced, but the brain is not receiving the stop signal. This phenomenon is called leptin resistance. As brain is in starvation state, people tend to overeat. This finally results in weight gain. How can we control obesity? Many researchers investigated the possibility of leptin intake for obesity treatment. Initially scientists believed that, giving leptin supplements will help to get the stop signal to brain. But this will work, only if a patient is leptin deficient or else the obese person is simply increasing the leptin content. Leptin resistance is not varied by giving leptin injection. Magic medicines based on leptin are not yet produced for weight loss. Leptin science started only in 1994 and leptin has many functions including bone developments, immunity, cardiac functioning etc. Experiments with leptin have a long way to go and should explore different possibilities. As of now, experts advice to eat healthy foods by avoiding processed, refined and fast foods. “Prevention is better than cure”, under obese condition the brain is not getting stop signal, hence one should have a consistent determination to balance the body weight.

[Biji C.L. Research Scholar, Dept. of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, Trivandrum]

Ask yourself: How significant is my life? Do I make a difference? When I move...

when I act... when I do something... does the universe notice?

Do I really matter?

-Andy Andrews


Sometimes we come across amusing mistakes from ludicrous misuse of words. The wrongly used word may be similar in sound to the right word. The word malapropism came from the fictional Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's play, The Rivals. She made several humorous errors. Let us see a few examples of malapropism.

• ‘Don't’ is a contraption. (contraction)• A horse divided against itself cannot stand. (house)• Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. (President)• Abraham Lincoln signed the Emasculation Proclamation.

(Emancipation)• Ancient Egyptians wrote in hydraulics. (hieroglyphics)• Charles Darwin wrote the Organ of Species. (Origin)• Good punctuation means not being late. (punctuality)• He had to use a fire distinguisher. (extinguisher)• He is a wolf in cheap clothing. (sheep’s)• He is the very pineapple of politeness. (pinnacle)• He was a man of great statue. (stature)• Illiterate him quite from your memory. (Obliterate)• Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul.

(distinguished)• Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. (rabies. A rabbi is a

Jewish religious leader.)• Madam Curie discovered radio. (radium)• Michelangelo painted the sixteenth Chapel. (Sistine)• Miguel de Cervantes wrote "Donkey Hote." (Don Quixote)• Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten

Commandments. (Sinai)• She is an unbridled optometrist. (optimist)• Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

(circumnavigated)• Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. (hemlock)• Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

(concubines)• The Greeks were a highly sculptured people. (cultured)• The monster is just a pigment of your imagination. (figment) Tail piece: The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube.

[Garnered by B S Warrier]

Malapropism

Language Lines


Quick Response (QR) code (EKL May'11), similar to barcodes, is printed as blocks of black and white and has now become a common in posters, leaflets and magazines for sharing information by directing consumers to product websites when scanned by smartphones. They are becoming increasingly popular in marketing and can hold more information than traditional barcodes.

Now, Dr. Stanley May, professor of chemistry at University of South Dakota and Profs. Jon Kellar and William Cross at South Dakota School of Mines & Technologies, have made an invisible version of the

Invisible QR Codes To Combat Counterfeitism

CounterfeitingCounterfeiting is the process of fraudulently manufactur-

ing, or altering a product that is of lesser value than the genuine product and selling it under a well-known brand name without the owner’s authorization. This wide ranging crime is estimated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to cost the world economy nearly $250 billion a year. Counterfeiters are involved in the illegal production of items in virtually every area – food, drinks, clothes, shoes, pharmaceuticals, electronics, auto parts, toys, currency, tickets for transport systems and concerts, al-cohol, cigarettes, toiletries, building materials etc. and the list is endless.

Based on the nature of the counterfeit goods, there can be serious health and safety problems for consumers. Counterfeit baby foods can even be fatal, while sub-standard toys, car parts and electrical goods can lead to serious safety risks.

Fraudulent medicines present one of the most harmful forms of counterfeit goods. According to WHO, in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, fraudulent pharmaceuticals amount to as much as 30 per cent of the market. These medicines may contain wrong dose of active ingredients, or none at all, or a completely different ingredient. They can lead to world’s most dangerous diseases such as malaria becoming stronger by contributing to the development of drug-resistant strains, due to ineffective active ingredients in the medicine.

[For details: http://en.wikipedia.org/, http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com]

Tech Lines


One may wonder at the weird shapes of fruits and vegetables around. These are natural. But farmers in Japan and China are known to have produced designer fruits and vegetables of desired shapes. They are grown in specially designed moulds of specific shapes. Cubic and pyramid watermelons, baby-shaped pears and bear-shaped potatoes are examples. But nature brings a large variety, moulded in natural shapes.

It is not unusual that the shapes of fruits and vegetables attract the attention of researchers. A research team which studied different shapes in tomatoes revealed that these shapes are controlled by a spe-cific gene named sun, isolated from an oval shaped variety of tomatoe with a pointed end. The gene is commonly found to be present in all elongated varieties. The team conducted several plant-transformation experiments by introducing sun gene into wild, round - fruit - bear-ing tomatoe plants. These plants produced extremely elongated fruit. When the gene was removed from the elongated-fruit-bearing plants, they produced round fruits similar to the wild tomatoes.

Researchers hope that by manipulating genes, fruits and vegetables of desired sizes, colours and shapes could be produced.

[Courtesy: http://www.bukisa.com]

Shapes of Fruit To Our Choice

Food Lines

QR code using inks based on nanoparticles that fluoresce only when excited by near-infrared light. The process is known as ‘upconversion’ where the nanoparticles absorb photons in the invisible near-infrared part of the spectrum, and then emit visible light. This new technology holds great potential in the fight against counterfeiting and forgery.

The technology can be customized as the needs continue to evolve. The composition of the inks and the characteristics of the code ‘readers’ can be manipulated to adapt to a broad range of applications like printing on materials to prevent tampering and securing important documents such as passports and other identification and security cards.

[For details: http://www.usd.edu/, http://nanotechweb.org,]


Energy Lines

Eventhough there are numerous advantages like the ability to reach high-speed winds at higher altitudes, kite-based energy systems have not yet taken off in a big way.

Now a Berlin-based wind energy developer NTS GmbH jointly with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) is developing a “kite power station” to make this a reality. In this, the kites attached to cables around 700 meters long, would allow them to fly at heights of 300 to 500 metres. Unlike the earlier “Flygen” systems that have the turbines built into the kite, the NTS system would tether the cables to vehicles on the ground that are pulled around a circuit on rails by the power of the wind. The kinetic energy of the vehicles is then converted into electricity using a generator.

The ground vehicles would also contain the measuring and control technology with a horizontal and vertical angle sensors located in each cable line and a force sensor within the cable distributor enabling precise control of the kite’s movements. A kite flying in a figure-eight or sine-wave flight pattern can generate a pulling power of up to 10 kiloNewtons (kN), which would give a kite with a surface area of 20 m2 the capacity to pull one ton.

Fraunhofer claims that at a height of 100 meters wind speeds are around 15 meters per second. "Doubling the wind speed results in eight times the energy,” says IPA engineer Joachim Montnacher.

“Depending on wind conditions, eight kites with a combined surface area of up to 300 sq.m can equate to 20 conventional one MW wind turbines.”

But it’s not just the ability to reach the higher wind speeds, but also the consistency of the wind at these heights that offers kite-based systems an advantage over conven-tional wind turbines. This provides the potential for locations that are

Kite PowerChallenging Wind Turbines


Waste, also known as rubbish, trash, refuse, garbage, junk, and litter, is unwanted, unused, unusable or useless materials. Once an object has become waste, it will remain waste until it has been fully recovered and no longer poses a potential threat to the environment or to human health. The word 'waste' and the act of 'wasting' are human inventions. Waste does not exist in nature where everything has a purpose.

According to the Basel Convention and UN reference, waste refers to "Substances or objects which are disposed off or are intended to be disposed off or are required to be disposed off by the provisions of international law. Wastes are materials for which the generator has no further use in terms of his/her own purposes of production, transformation or consumption, and of which he/she wants to dispose. Wastes may be generated during the extraction of raw materials, the processing of raw materials into intermediate and final products, the consumption of final products, and other human activities. Residuals recycled or reused at the place of generation are excluded”.

Many countries spell their perception of waste with guidance for its management. According to UK's Environmental Protection Act 1990, waste includes any substance which constitutes a scrap material, an effluent or other unwanted surplus arising from the application of any process or any substance or article which requires to be disposed of, which has been broken, worn out, contaminated or otherwise spoiled. It is also any substance or object which the producer or the person in

Waste ManagementA Perennial Problem

Environment Lines

unsuitable for conventional wind turbines to be considered as sites for kite power systems which will be cheaper to build than large tower-mounted wind turbines.

NTS and IPA researchers have already begun trials in Germany. It is estimated that an NTS system could replace 30 two-MW conventional wind turbines and supply power to around 30,000 homes.[For details: http://www.fraunhofer.de, http://www.ipa.fraunhofer.de,

http://www.wired.com]


possession of it, discards or intends or is required to discard but with exception of anything excluded from the scope of the Waste Directive. Further, waste shall be presumed to be waste unless the contrary is proved. The European Union has started a discussion that is expected to end in an End-of-Waste directive which will clarify the distinction between waste, which shall be treated for disposal, and raw materials that can be reused for the same or other purposes.

Waste is directly linked to human development, both technological and social. Affluence is considered as the main factor in the production of waste by individuals. Together with compulsion and temptation, people own things without evaluating the real need aspect. After owning things, they turn out to be waste. The composition of wastes varies with industrial development and innovations. Examples of this include development of plastics and nuclear technology. Waste is created by humans for short-term ‘convenience’. Wasting results in long-term harmful consequences for humans, nature, and the economy. Waste is sometimes a subjective concept, because items that some people discard may have value to others. Some people view waste as "a resource that is not safely recycled back into the environment or the marketplace." This definition takes into account the value of waste as a resource, as well as the threat it can present to the environment and public health, if not recycled safely. Such concepts are colloquially expressed in western culture by such idioms as "One man's trash is another man's treasure."

It is estimated that nearly 208 million tons of solid waste is produced by individuals in America every year, and the number is growing. This works out to about two kg per day per individual. In addition, 7.6 billion tons of industrial waste is produced yearly in the country. Waste is disposed of through different methods to keep the environment clean.

Solid waste, as it is generally referred to, means any garbage, refuse, sludge from a waste treatment plant, water supply treatment plant, or air pollution control facility and other discarded material, including solid, liquid, semisolid, or contained gaseous material resulting from industrial, commercial, mining, and agricultural operations, and from community activities, but does not include solid or dissolved mate-rial in domestic sewage, or solid or dissolved materials in irrigation return flows or industrial discharges which are point sources subject to permits under relevant law. The two distinct categories of waste are hazardous and non-hazardous. Hazardous waste is immediately dan-


gerous to public health and the environment, whereas non-hazardous may have negative long-term effects.

Hazardous waste means a solid waste, or combination of solid wastes, which because of its quantity, concentration, or physical, chemical, or infectious characteristics may cause, or significantly contribute to an increase in mortality or an increase in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness; or pose a substantial present or potential hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed.

Radioactive material resulting from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, including liquid waste produced directly in reprocessing and any solid material derived from such liquid waste that contains fission products in sufficient concentrations, is considered as radioactive waste, and by rule requires permanent isolation.

Medical waste means any solid waste which is generated in the diagnosis, treatment, or immunization of human beings or animals, in research pertaining thereto, or in the production or testing of biological materials. Such term does not include any waste identified or listed under the category, hazardous.

Mixed waste contains both hazardous and non-hazardous waste.Transuranic waste means material contaminated with elements

that have an atomic number greater than 92, including neptunium, plutonium, americium, and curium, and that are in concentrations greater than 10 nanocuries per gram, or in such other concentrations as may be prescribed to protect the public health and safety.

The most common type of waste disposal is the landfill. Incineration is also another common method. Recycling has grown in popularity, proving effective in dealing with solid, non-hazardous waste.

[CGS]http://www.ehow.com/facts_7182560_production-disposal-waste.

html#ixzz1jQ3VDRCK

Life and DeathDeath asked Life: Why does everyone love you and hate me?Life replied: Because I am a Beautiful Lie and you are a Painful Truth.


A doctor’s prescription usually consists of various items. The first part is likely to contain the medicines you need to take, in the second there may be a noting of the tests asked for, and in the final line are the instructions to patients. This last part is taken pretty much casually by the patient. How many times have you ignored the casual part of a medical prescription- the one that says, ‘diet control, warm gargles, steam inhalations, regular exercise’ and so on? While the prescribed pill is taken, albeit with the usual grumble of ‘too many drugs these days, all have side effects, etc., the part where time and effort are required is often wished away and by far and large, ignored. In reality, treatment is better effective, longer lasting and complication free with these remedies, apart from being easier on the purse.

Take the matter of a simple sore throat. The antibiotic is taken, perhaps the ice water is also given up, but the hot water gargles are often left out, if done, rather half heartedly once in a way. The same is the case of all inhalations and fomentations for various joint aches. Do spend the time to heal your body.

All these little tricks have plenty of scientific reasoning behind them. Heat applied to a sore muscle draws more blood to the injured area and aids healing. The same reasoning also works for a sore throat or a Sitz bath (a simple remedy for piles and fistula). The antibiotics work only if there is bacterial infection; otherwise we are only helping the bacteria to develop resistance. Even when an antibiotic is needed, a gargle or fomentation helps in cutting down the inflammation. It is like the soothing word of a friend when you have had a bad day. This is not to cut down the role of pharmaceutical preparations- far from it, but to gently goad you along to also participate in self help remedies/ instructions.

How many individuals follow dietary advice? Diabetic medications can help you only that far; you need to help yourself with a good control on your calories, even if it means drastic life style changes. The same goes for heart and kidney disease where they can be better controlled with dietary compliance. As a veteran of nearly four decades of practice, I can vouch that dietary instructions are the least followed and worse, neglected to such an extent that it has become a problem in entire families. Sadly today, we have to advise even children and

Doctor’s Prescription The Neglected Part

Health Lines


yy Just do not compare with others for fame and social status and see whose children are doing better, etc., but challenge others for happiness, health, enjoyment, quality of life and longevity...yy Don't worry about things that you can't change because it doesn't help and it may spoil your health. You have to create your own well-being and find your own place of happiness. As long as you are in good mood and good health, think about happy things, do happy things daily and have fun in doing, then you will pass your time happily every day.yy One day passes without happiness, you will lose one day. One day passes with happiness, and then you gain one day.yy In good spirit, sickness will cure; in a happy spirit, sickness will cure faster; in high and happy spirits, sickness will never come.yy With good mood, suitable amount of exercise, always in the sun, variety of foods, reasonable amount of vitamin and mineral intake, hopefully you will live another 20 or 30 years of healthy life with pleasure.yy Above all, learn to cherish the goodness around... and FRIENDS... They all make you feel young and "wanted"... without them you are surely to feel lost!!

[Sourced by: Susy Mathew]

Inspirational Words

pre teens on dietary control. Never in earlier decades did pediatricians have to mark their little patients as overweight! If the cause is because of our lifestyles, the remedy is obviously in our hands and in those few words written as the last line of your prescription.

This time around give these last few words the attention they deserve. When it comes to diet control and consequent weight control, take heed and make it a life time change. Your hot water bottle or ice pack should be your first aid remedy rather than the pain relieving drug. Often, time spent in executing these remedies is the culprit, be it the time taken for preparing a meal or fomenting your bad back. Invest time in the care of your body. It will pay rich dividends.

A small suggestion to my doctor friends. Do write out instructions like diet, exercise, gargles etc as the first thing in your prescription. Your patient may then give it the attention it deserves.

[Dr Jyotsna Codaty, Sr. Consultant, Transfusion Medicine, Chennai]

www.letstalkdoc.com


Management Lines

Several international analysts believe that in the foreseeable future India will occupy the center stage among the world’s nations. India’s economic capital and intellectual capital would be the envy of other nations. When that happens, the world will look up to India to un-derstand and emulate her leadership style. Intellectually and spiritually India should be ready to answer the question: “What characterizes Indian leadership style?” Any style is a function of the present and is expected to provide indicators to the future; the style owes a part of its relevance to the past, in the form of, its heritage. Those who forget the past will have no future; at the same time, a past without a future embedded in it is dead wood. While the driver looks at the front (future), the “state” of the car is also conditioned by what he sees in the rearview mirror (the past).

In what follows I have tried to characterize the mental make-up of a successful Indian leader in 2030. For the sake of form, let us call him Vijay. The list definitely bears my bias. I request readers to respond by supplementing the list with traits that they believe would differentiate the future Indian leader.Decision making

Decision making is the most important task for a leader. The platform for making decisions may be business, government, fam-ily, society, agriculture, education and so on. Traditionally the term “management“got associated only with business. But Vijay holds the view that success in every domain is governed by management and leadership imperatives. Vijay who in his first avatar headed a successful pharmaceutical business later transferred his decision - making skills to educational excellence and local self governance. Sustainable solutions

Challenges facing society, government, technology, environment and business change with every generation. Coping with these changes requires that leaders co-evolve with the changes. When we say that life is getting more and more complex, we mean that life has become a web of interconnections rather than remaining as disjoint entities. Vijay looks for interconnectedness among the parts of a system and goes behind the front-facing layer. He thus avoids falling into the trap of knee jerk reactions. His solutions tend to be sustainable.

An Indian Leader in 2030 A Ten Point Portrayal


Hard and soft factorsA complex structure possesses multiple stakeholders. These stake-

holders will have mutually conflicting needs. The system may also contain non-negotiable constraints such as governmental regulations. The relationship among the elements may not be linear. Many ele-ments cannot be quantified and yet they play a vital part in arriving at an optimal solution. Vijay is aware that quantifiable parameters in the situation co-exist with qualitative parameters. He is rational in so far as objective information is concerned. At the same time he respects and takes into consideration subjective elements such as feelings and emotions.Context dependent solutions

Vijay understands that there is no unique solution to any problem in the world. Design of a solution is nothing but choosing the optimum solution for a given context from among a set of solutions. A solution that worked during the 1980’s need not work today; a solution that worked in Kochi may not work in Lucknow. Vijay, while aware of the benefits of reusing solutions, is alert to the context-dependent nature of the solutions.Empathy

Vijay is a stickler for schedules and is a hard task master. He pro-vides enough opportunities for his managers to fail and learn from their failures. When the situation in an important project reaches a crisis, he steps in and redefines the solution. He lets his managers find new routes to existing destinations while he himself is engaged in discovering new destinations. Since he views human capital as the most important ingredient, he does not believe in a one-size-fit-all HR benefit policy. He does not believe in reducing the performance of his people to a Normal distribution. He believes in letting his people choose the benefits – some may prefer membership to professional societies or social clubs, some may prefer health insurance cover for their parents, some others may value a high-sounding designation more than any monetary benefit. Versatility

Vijay qualified as a specialist in Operations Research (OR) during his MBA education at Harvard. That has not biased him from looking at every problem as one that can be reduced to an OR model. He has successfully insulated himself from pre-conceived models. He does not want to offer technologically brilliant solutions to some problem but spends a disproportionate amount of time in understanding the problem upfront. He did specialize in niche areas in the initial part of


his career but developed into a versatilist which enables him to look at issues from multiple perspectives. He sees the forest and not just the trees; he listens to the music underlying the chirping of birds. Feedback, feedback and feedback

Vijay’s single mantra for his managers is to constantly seek feedback from every available quarter – employees, customers, investors, regula-tory authorities and even from competitors. Since he believes that ex-cellence is not a destination but a journey, he asserts that only feedback can navigate one on the right path to excellence. He has demonstrated that even adverse feedback can be given in a manner that does not hurt the ego of the recipient. Global skills tailored for local conditions

Vijay had studied several theories and case studies in different parts of the world. When applying them to solve problems for a given region, he thinks and behaves like an inhabitant of that region. He understands the local culture before customizing global solutions to specific regions. Flexible mental models

Vijay knows that his strategy is governed by how he looks at an organization. An organization can be viewed as a machine with rigid processes and workflows or as an organism with internal adjustments for survival. It can be viewed as a brain with capabilities to learn and adapt or as an instrument of domination for exploiting specific groups. Vijay uses appropriate models depending on the context. He does not entertain rigid mental models.Ethics and social responsibility

Vijay is a role model for ethical behavior. He can be said to have set up standards and benchmarks for others to evaluate their own be-havior under different circumstances. His social responsibility did not stop with compliance to laws of the land. It did not stop with making generous financial contributions; it did not even stop with discharging actual service on the field during calamities. He used his core compe-tency in pharmaceuticals to initiate action that saw the eradication of water borne diseases from the country. He transferred the technology free of cost to several NGOs so that the entire country could benefit.

(Elsewhere in this issue is a review of the book "I Too Had a Dream" which is an autobiography of Verghese Kurien, an Indian leader fulfilling the characteristics of a global role model.)To respond: [email protected], [email protected]

[R Narayanan]


Volume 8 Issue 4 November 2012

Editorial OfficeKnowledge House, Mathrubhumi Road, Trivandrum 695 035, India.

Contact: Senior Knowledge Executive, Tel. 91 471 247 2928email: [email protected] [email protected] www.knowledgelines.com

A Taste of EKL Please visit the EKL website below to

read selected contents from back issues:www.knowledgelines.com

Looking Back at EKL• BreadFruit–StapleFood –EKL Apr. 2007

• SteeringMechanism– Manual to Power Assisted – EKL Oct. 2009

• CabinAirinAirliners–PassengerComfortatHighAltitudes – EKL Jun. 2009

• SnoringandSleepApnea–TreatingwithnewDental Appliances – EKL Jan. 2010

• Plasma–TheFourthStateofMatter –EKL Apr. 2011

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Improve your concentration.Use reasoning and fill each row, column and 3 x 3 grid in bold borders with each of the digits

from 1 to 9.Solution on page 46.

EKL Sudoku 72[Hard]

7 2 34 9

5 6 98 2 7

5 86 8 2

9 1 23 64 9 5

In Forthcoming Issuesw Secured Gas, Safe Lab: Compressed gas cylinders are there in

most labs, and their use entails a high level of responsibility, as they are generally pyrophoric (spontaneously combustible above 57º C) or cryogenic.

w Preventing infection on long flights: The cabin of a spacecraft halfway to Mars would be the least convenient place for a Salmonella or Pneumococcus outbreak. But a study suggests that microgravity and prolonged space flight could give unique advantages to germs.

w Making Renewable Liquid Transportation Fuels: From biomass and electricity.

w Eliminating Loss in Electrical Power Transmission: Magnetic topological insulator concept.

w DNA as a Digital Storage Medium: New technologies in both DNA synthesis and sequencing aim at this.


TechnologyThrough the Ages - Part 18

Tech Lines

Einstein, the quintessential theoretical physicist who never handled any instrument beyond paper and pencil, could, by no means, be faulted for this naive prediction. Who on the face of this earth doesn’t know today that E = mc2, the most popular of all the equations of Einstein, is at the heart of the colossal energy inside the nuclear bomb, or the stars such as our Sun ? But then, what about Ernest Rutherford who declared in 1933, “Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine” ? Rutherford, the father of Nuclear Physics, was by far the most brilliant experimenter of his time. As it happened, they both lived in a time when splitting

an atomic nucleus was beyond the realm of all possibility.

Yet, Einstein wrote on August 2, 1939 the famous letter (See Box) to President Roosevelt recommending the development of atom (nuclear) bomb ! An avowed pacifist, he was impelled by the ominous certainty of Hitler’s scientists developing the new bomb first. Based on Einstein’s recommendation, work on the nu-clear bomb was promptly initiated by the USA under the code name, the Manhattan Project. Oddly, there were top-notch military lead-ers, too, who were skeptical about the new weapon. None less than Winston Churchill commented in 1939, “Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explo-sives, but it is unlikely to produce

“There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be available from the atom.”

- Einstein, 1932


Sir: Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been

communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bomb of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air…

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over … Kaiser Willhelm Institute of Berlin, where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

Yours very truly, A. Einstein.

Einstein’s Letter to President Roosevelt

anything very much more dangerous.” Admiral William Leaky warned President Truman in 1945 in most uncharitable terms, “This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The (atomic) bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.”

Later, on seeing the appalling consequences of his recommendation, Einstein dubbed his letter as ‘the greatest mistake’ of his life !

(to be continued)[P Radhakrishnan]


A Perspective on Internet Security Threats and Dangers Online - 5

Tech Lines

Smartphones and the Internet Security: ‘Connectivity’ and ‘mobility’ are the inthing in the digital age. The unprecedented popularity and phenomenal growth in the usage of Wireless Mobile Devices (WMDes), particularly the smartphone, bear testimony to the inroads these mobile devices have made into the life of individuals in modern times. The following are excerpts from the Time Magazine, which beautifully describe how much we have come to depend on the mobile phone.

‘The mobile phone has become a kind of super-extension of ourselves – faster, brainier, more reliable and always on. ….….. Mobility is changing the world around us, from education to politics, from medicine to romance’[1].

‘Just as remarkable as the power of mobility, over everything from love to learning to global development, is how fast it happened. It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Not the knife or match, the pen or page. Only money comes close – always at hand, don’t leave home without it. But most of us don’t take a wallet to bed with us, do not reach for it every few minutes, however useful money is in pursuit of fame, romance, revolution, it is inert compared with a smartphone – which can replace money anyway………… Like any romance moving from infatuation to commitment, the connection between people and their mobile devices reflects what they brought into the relationship in the first place’. For more on the above see reference [2].

The research agency ComScore’s Report ‘2012 – Mobile Future in Focus’ released in February 23, 2012 shows that the use of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets as a gateway to access internet/web is increasing at an unprecedented rate. Singapore tops the list with the mobile devices accounting for about 11.5% of the internet traffic. India is in the eighth position with 5.1% of the internet traffic. The implications of this will be clear if we consider the fact that India is one of the fastest growing market for mobile phones (and other mobile devices too) and has already over 120 million internet users. It is projected to hit 350 million, catapulting India to a global ranking of 2 [3]. Internet access thus is becoming easier and universal


so also are the associated security issues. Consider the implications of this in the context of the growth of the Internet Economy. ‘Internet has established its role as a powerful economic force multiplier with a new study projecting that its contribution to India’s GDP will explode to $100 billion by 2015 from $30 billion at present’[3]. For more details see the reference cited.

Mobile Application Development is at an all time high owing to widespread use of smartphones and other WMDes. However, when it comes to security of information in these applications, it is mostly nonexistent or improperly implemented. These vulnerable applications open the room for hackers to compromise them and steal sensitive information [4]. With many people using their smartphones for banking, email, shopping, social networking, and storing information, they are sources of confidential information that can be exploited [5]. For a detailed report on the above see the cited reference. Mahesh Rakheja, Android Developer who has developed a ‘Android Spy Agent’, highlights the vulnerability of mobile applications in the above cited report.

Several recent reports indicate to the fact the mobile privacy issue is more prevalent than malicious applications. Reuters reported: Some advertising networks have been secretly collecting application users personal details over the past year and now have access to millions of smartphones globally, U.S.-based mobile security firm Lookout said. "Aggressive ad networks are much more prevalent than malicious applications. It is the most prevalent mobile privacy issue that exists", Kevin Mahaffey, Lookout's Technology Chief and Cofounder, told Reuters in an interview. Over 80 million applications have been downloaded which carry a form of invasive ads - used by 5 percent of all free apps on Google's Android platform - which can take data from phones or install software without users' knowledge…Mobile devices have so far had limited appeal for writers of viruses and other malicious software, or malware, due to numerous small platforms and limited financial gains…. But during the first quarter, the amount of malware on the popular Android platform jumped to 7,000 from 600, according to Intel's security software arm McAfee. For more on the above report see reference[6].Online Social Networking and Privacy: Privacy is a property of individuals, Confidentiality is a property of data, and Security is a property assigned to hardware and software systems. From a practical perspective, the concepts are interwoven[7]. Online social networking has very serious privacy and security implications


as peoples’ trust, personal relationships and civic and political involvement are connected to the use of social networking sites. Listen to what Open Software fame Richard M. Stallman has to say about social networking: “Remember that Facebook – social networking sites – is not your friend. Facebook does massive surveillance. Facebook’s data mining activities includes massive spying on people browsing the internet”. Reuters reports that ‘Living in a world of social networking and mobile smartphones means trading away some of your personal information’[8].

A report in Scientific American states that ‘Social networking sites allow seemingly trivial gossip to be distributed to a worldwide audience, sometimes making people the butt of rumors shared by millions of users across the Internet. Public sharing of private lives has led to a rethinking of our current conceptions of privacy. Existing law should be extended to allow some privacy protection for things that people say and do in what would have previously been considered the public domain’[9].

“As we leave ever more detailed online footprints – via purchasing, browsing and social relationships – a vast big ‘data ecosystem’ has emerged to collect, process and resell this information…. While these (concerns about privacy) are important questions, they do not capture the full extent of how this data might be used – not just to extract information about people’s desires and social relationships, but to use that understanding to affect their behaviour. Nor would this be limited to the banal goal of getting you purchase a particular product; it could be used to internet-scale social monitoring and manipulation. The ease with which we adopt online personas and relationships has created a blind spot that computer technology is well suited to exploit. Advances in natural language processing and data mining make it entirely feasible to mint millions of ‘social bots’, each establishing online friendships with their targets like virtual con men, each building trust over time and delivering personalized messages designed to elicit information, sway opinion or call to action. The idea ‘social architecture’ completely upends traditional computer security concerns” says Stefan Savage, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego[10]. [1]‘Making Sense of Our Wireless World’, Richard Stengel, Managing

Editor,Time, August 27, 2012[2]‘Your Life is Fully Mobile’, Nancy Gibbs, Time, August 27, 2012[3] The Hindu, September 30, 2012[4]Mobile Application Security Risk and Remediation, Anurag Kumar

Jain & Devendra Shanbhag, TCS, Hackers Conference 2012, New Delhi, July 29, 2012

[5] Computer jocks hack off web safety myths, Times of India, July 30, 2012


The shorter the time between stroke patients arriving at a hospital and receiving the clot-busting agent tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), the greater the chance to reduce brain injury after stroke, according to new research reported by American Heart Association.

A hospital stroke team used auto industry “lean” manufacturing principles to accelerate treatment times. They identified unnecessary or inefficient steps such as inefficient patient transportation, tasks performed one at a time rather than simultaneously, and time-consuming traditional lab-based tests. Protocols were formulated to eliminate wasteful steps, keeping only crucial steps that added “value” to patient care, in keeping with auto-manufacturers’ lean methods which eliminates inefficiencies in automobile production.

As a result the overall treatment time was reduced from the usual 60 minutes to 39 minutes, without altering patient safety or clinical outcomes. However, a larger study is needed to validate results, researchers said.

[For details: www.heart.org]

Handling Stroke Patients Auto Industry Shows Example

Health Lines

If you have one true friend, you have more than your share.

- Thomas Fuller

[6] Privacy risk from ads in apps rising: security firm, Reuters, July 09, 2012

[7]www.albion.com/security/intro-4.html[8]The complex interplay of social media and privacy, Reuters, Feb 19,

2012[9] Do Social networks bring end of privacy?, Scientific American,

August 18, 2008[10]‘In Planning Digital Defenses, the Biggest Obstacle Is Human

Ingenuity’, Stefan Savage, December 5, 2011, The New York Times

[Dr H.Ganesh, San Jose, USA]


email has Paralyzed my Life.!!• As we progress into 2013, I want to thank you for your educational

e-mails over the past year. I am totally screwed up now and have little chance of recovery.

• I can no longer open a bathroom door without using a paper towel, nor let the waitress put lemon slices in my ice water without worrying about the bacteria on the lemon peel.

• I can't sit down on a hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it since it was last washed.

• I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pastime while driving alone is picking one's nose.

• Eating a little snack sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years.

• I can't touch any woman's handbag for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public toilet.

• I must send my special thanks for the email about rat poo in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.

• ALSO, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason. I can't have a drink in a bar because I fear I'll wake up in a bathtub full of ice with my kidneys gone.

• I can't eat at KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes, feet or feathers.

• I can't use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.

• Thanks to you I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an e-mail to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.

• Because of your concern , I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains.

• I no longer buy fuel without taking someone along to watch the car, so a serial killer doesn't crawl in my back seat when I'm filling up.

• I no longer use Cling Wrap in the microwave because it causes seven different types of cancer.

[Sourced by: Susy Mathew]


A technique that uses acoustic waves to sort cells on a chip may lead to realise miniature medical analytic devices, according to a team of researchers led by Dr. Tony Jun Huang, Associate Professor of engineering science and mechanics, Pennsylvania State University.

The device uses two beams of acoustic - or sound - waves to act as acoustic tweezers and sort a continuous flow of cells on a coin sized chip. By changing the frequency of the acoustic waves, researchers can easily alter the paths of the cells. Huang said that since the device can sort cells into five or more channels, it will allow more cell types to be analyzed simultaneously, which paves the way for smaller, more efficient and less expensive analytic devices. "Eventually, you could do analysis on a device about the size of a cell phone," said Huang.

Most current cell-sorting devices allow the cells to be sorted into only two channels in one step. According to Huang, another drawback of current cell-sorting devices is that cells must be encapsulated into droplets, which complicates further analysis. “Today, cell sorting is done on bulky and very expensive devices. We want to minimize them so they are portable, inexpensive and can be powered by batteries,” said Huang. Using sound waves for cell sorting is less likely to damage cells than current techniques, Huang added.

The new device could be used by biological, genetic and medical labs for various types of analysis, including blood and genetic testing.

[For details: http://www.esm.psu.edu,]

Acoustic Cell-Sorting Chip For Mobile-size Medical Labs

Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself – no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are – completely; the good and the bad – and make changes as YOU see fit – not because you think someone else wants you to be different.

- Stacey Charter

Health Lines


Information Explosion The Challenge - Part 13

Info Lines

The truth is that the human brain is not yet evolved to cope with the rapidly advancing technological applications and information explosion. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dean’s Professor of Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts, in his book ‘The Black Swan’, which is considered to be one of the twelve most influential books since World War II, and in his best international seller ‘Fooled by Randomness’, exhaustively describes the mismatch between the human mind and rapidly evolving technology intensive environment. Nicholas Taleb argues that the human mind has not yet evolved to cope with the modern, complex, increasingly recursive environment. Recursive here means that the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of even more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snow balls and arbitrary and unpredictable planetwide winner-take-all effects. We live in an environment where information flows too rapidly, accelerating such epidemics……….Our intuitions are made for an environment with simpler causes and effects and slowly moving information. ……We do not spontaneously learn that we do not learn that we do not learn. We do not learn rules, just facts and only facts……..We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion..……Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do – except of course, when we think about it. In spite of our progress and growth in knowledge or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable [1].

Scientific research and studies corroborate Nicholas Taleb’s assertions as right on the dot. Further, several studies show that information technology weakens our natural ability for deep thinking and introspection, while strengthening more of our ability for peripheral thinking. The irony is that, on the one hand, technology is making the future more unpredictable, and on the other hand, it weakens our ability to cope with randomness!

The proponents of technological determinism argue that society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. There are other scholars and historians who believe that the laws or physical or biological situations decide the course of events in history.


The human will does not determine it. Under such circumstances technology’s role is that of a medium through which physical laws shape the course of human events. Thomas P. Hughes, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed the term ‘technological momentum’ to describe the relationship between technology and society over time. In Hughes's theory, when a technology is young, deliberate control over its use and scope is possible and is enacted by society. However, as a technology matures, and becomes increasingly enmeshed in the society where it was created, its own deterministic force takes hold [2].

Critics of technological determinism are of the view that technology is neutral – technology is neither good or bad in itself; in other words, it is value free. Technology’s effect on the society is determined by how we choose to use the technology; as the famous proverb goes, ‘ bad worker always blames his tools’. In general, technologists and technology users being stake holders and promoters of technology, strongly advocate the neutrality of technology. There are several eminent thinkers who subscribe to this point of view. The critics of neutrality of technology point out that the views of the former are only either speculative or subjective and are not backed by scientific studies.

Steven Arthur Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is well known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker opines that ‘experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain…… As the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book ‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us’, the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing, they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music does not make you better at mathematics, conjugating Latin does not make you more logical, brain-training games do not make you smarter…….. to encourage intellectual depth, do not rail at PowerPoint or Google. It is not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet……The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower


and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart’ For more on this see reference [3] and Professor Pinker’s writings.

Now look at what Professor Garry Small has to say about the influence of information technology applications. Dr Garry Small M.D., is the Director of the Memory and Aging Research at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at the University of California, Los Angeles. Scientific Americans Magazine has named him as one of the world’s top innovators in science and technology. Garry Small leads a team of neuroscientists who are scientifically demonstrating that exposure to computer technology causes rapid and profound changes in brain neural circuitry. In his recent book ‘iBrain, Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind’(Harper Collins Publishers, N.Y., 2008), Garry Small shows that the current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate, but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.

There is a very large group of scholars, theorists, sociologists, scientists, medical professional and futurologists who vouch for the non-neutrality of technology. Jaques Ellul, a French Philosopher, Sociologist and lay Theologian was one of the early critics of neutrality of technology. Jaques Ellul was a Professor at the University of Bordeaux and authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime in all. As one of the prominent of the theorists of technological autonomy, he approached technology from a dialectical viewpoint and his constant concern has been the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity [4]. Jacques Ellul argued that we cannot merely use technology without also, to some extent, being influenced or used by it. 'Technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences.….Technical development is neither good, bad nor neutral. We become conditioned by our technological systems or environments’ opined Jacques Ellul. Neil Postman, in his famous book Technopoly, Surrender of Culture to Technology’, presents a picture of the technopoly we live in, a self justifying, self perpetuating system wherein technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life. Neil Postman traces the effects of


technology upon what we mean by politics, religion, intellect, history – even privacy and truth [5].[1] The Black Swan, The impact of the highly improbable, Nasim

Nicholas Taleb, The Random House Publishing Group, N.Y., 2010

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_momentum[3] Mind Over Mass media, Steven Pinker, The New York Times, June

10, 2010[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul[5] Technopoly, Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman,

Vintage Books, N.Y., 1993 [Dr H. Ganesh, CA, USA]

Still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.

- J. R. R. Tolkien

According to Sian Beilock, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on Mathematics anxiety, for someone who has math anxiety, the anticipation of doing math prompts a brain reaction similar to as when they experience pain—say, burning one’s hand on a hot stove.

Using brain scans with an fMRI machine, scholars observed that the brain areas that are active when highly math-anxious people prepare to do math, overlap with the same brain areas that register the threat of bodily harm and or physical pain.

For the study, the scholars worked with 14 adults who were shown to have math anxiety based on their responses to a series of questions about math. The questions gauged one’s anxiety when receiving a math textbook, walking to math class etc.

[For details: http://www.biosciencetechnology.com, http://news.uchicago.edu]

Highly Mathematics-anxious People Brain Response Similar to Physical Pain

Science Lines


A Quick LookIn this column we take a quick look at some books and articles in

magazines which we consider noteworthy. As another item, we also give some expressions in English language which we come across during our journey through various publications of repute. The selection is based on brevity, simplicity and power of words in daily use (not requiring dictionary reference), style etc.

Readers are also encouraged to send similar items to be included in future issues for the benefit of other readers. ([email protected])

- Editorial Team

Classy Express ions

• Transparency will act as a kind of disinfectant for businesses, and it will start healing companies’ relationships with their customers.

• The rise of digital goods and software-reliant gadgets has thrown a wrench in the contemporary concept of ownership.

• First Sale is the legal doctrine that governs our right to buy, sell, and loan things like CDs, books, DVDs, and any other product that is covered by copyright without first having to obtain permission from the product’s copyright holder.

Ar t i c l e s

The New Corporate Garage Where today’s most innovative - and world-changing - thinking is taking place.

This is innovation’s fourth era, when the scale of a big company can unleash innovation rather than shackle it.

Magazine: Harvard Business Review September 2012

Heavy Hitters Make an Electric Car

This is the story of yet another electric car maker, Coda Automotive of Los Angels, who launched in the past spring its $37,250, five passenger, all electric sedan. Coda can travel as far as 125 miles on a charge - farther than its competitors the Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus, and Mitsubishi i-MiEV.

Magazine: FORTUNE, September 24, 2012


The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see

the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved

than it will be.

- Marcel Pagnol

Books

Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage Authors: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers Publisher: Portfolio 2012

If you accidentally try to order the same song twice from iTunes, you’ll be warned that you already own it. Not because it would be illegal or unethical for Apple to profit from your forgetfulness. There’s a clear busi ness reason: the leaders of iTunes realize there’s no better way to make you trust them than to be totally honest when you least expect it.

The Lean Startup How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous

Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Author: Eric Ries Publisher: Crown Business 2011

Eric Ries defines a start-up as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty- true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late.


Books Scan

You may love him for his patriotic outlook, you may envy his self-confidence and “We can” attitude, you may hate his arrogant tone while trying to establish his viewpoint. You can not but salute Verghese Kurien’s single minded, self imposed goal to make India the largest producer of milk in the world. From a milk deficient country, India is today a milk surplus country. You can not but admire the process Kurien employed to overcome obstacles that came from far and near.

Kurien considered himself an employee of the poor milk producers in the villages. He brought them under an umbrella of cooperative movement. He used to say that the farmers had employed him for his skills in synthesizing market, technology, government and society. The emergent benefit was a win-win situation for both the producers and the consumers of milk and milk products.

He was their spokesman for marketing and for garnering support from the government. His account of working around the machinations of babus is interesting and educative. The saga of Kurien’s crusade and evangelism was enacted initially around Anand in Gujarat and later spread throughout the country. It remains the best case study that an Indian student of management and entrepreneurship can lay hands on.

Kurien had an utterly butterly smooth relationship with the aam aadmi and not-too-smooth a relationship with the bureaucracy. With vehemence he opposed the efforts of vested foreign interests who wanted to dump inappropriate technology into India. For example, he had to explode the myth that milk powder can be made only from cow’s milk and not from buffalo’s milk. The narrative in the book brings out how both the blow cold and blow hot relationships produced effective results. Kurien’s tough stand accompanied by confidence in Indian expertise resulted in a sustained indigenous campaign which came to be called “Operation Flood” or the “White revolution”. Revolution, it certainly was.

I Too Had a Dream Author: Verghese Kurien as told to Gauri SalviPublisher: Lotus Collection


A series of serendipitous events ensured that Kurien did not land a career as a metallurgical engineer. He might have ended up as a mundane CEO of a mundane steel company. In a letter to his grandson, Kurien says “Life is a privilege and to waste it would be wrong”. He wanted to utilize his native instinct to produce maximum good to maximum people. According to Kurien failure is not about not succeeding. It is about not putting in one’s best efforts and not contributing to the common good. Kurien, in a sense has personified the word dharma.

"I Too Had a Dream" is an autobiography of the Amul man, Varghese Kurien as narrated to journalist Gouri Salvi. The latter has preserved the straight language of the man in question. His clinical dissection of situations and his argumentative style silenced all opposition to his initiatives. Because of his strong linkages at the grass roots level, he enjoyed the patronage and unstinted support of everyone in power, especially the political class. On reading the account of his career we can see that Kurien fits admirably into the template of a successful Indian leader. I feel that the best way of reviewing this book is to quote Kurien. I am taking the liberty of choosing the passage that attracted me the most.

While integrity and loyalty are core values, there are other values, too, which are a prerequisite to achieve success in any field. For example, the leader has to set a personal example and make others understand in what ways ‘change’ is going to be useful. I believe that professionals working in our organizations must have clarity of thought combined with passionate pursuit of mastery of their subject. I have always emphasized that large endeavors are only the sum of many small parts and, therefore we must keep in mind not just where we are going but how we are going to reach there successfully.

The leader in Kurien can be gauged from the fact that he practiced the above concepts long before Peter Senge in his Fifth Discipline talked about Personal Mastery, Shared Vision, Mental model, Team Learning and Systems Thinking as contributing to organizational learning. Kurien deserved better recognition than what he got.

[R Narayanan](Courtesy: Amarnath Raja, CEO InApp, Technopark, Trivandrum)

Happiness is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them.

- Steve Maraboli


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We live in a world more complex and larger in scale than our forefathers could have ever imagined. Our technology-dependent society has become a diz-zying, interconnected web as unstable as a house of cards…

All it may take to send civilization crashing back to a preindustrial level is a nudge from what theorists like John L. Casti call an “X-Event” (short for “extreme event”), a rare and surprising event that may lead to extreme consequences. When an X-Event strikes - and scientists believe, it will - finance, communication, defense, and travel will stop dead in their tracks. The flow of food, electricity, medicine, and clean water will be disrupted for months, if not years.

In this book renowned complexity scientist, John L. Casti, shows how our world has become impossibly intricate. Technology is advanc-ing at an exponential rate and so too is our reliance on that technology in our everyday life. Yet it is a rule of both mathematics and human nature that higher and higher levels of complexity make a system correspondingly more fragile and vulnerable to sudden, spectacular collapse.Table of Contents: Preamble: Putting the "X" into X-Events Part I: Why Normal Isn't So "Normal" Anymore Part II: Getting Down to Cases X-Event 1: Digital Darkness / A Long-Term, Widespread Failure of the InternetX-Event 2: When do we Eat? / Breakdown of the Global Food-Supply SystemX-Event 3: The Day the Electronics Died / A Continent-Wide Elec-tromagnetic Pulse Destroys All ElectronicsX-Event 4: A New World Disorder / The Collapse of GlobalizationX-Event 5: Death by Physics / Destruction of the Earth Through the Creation of Exotic ParticlesX-Event 6: Blown Away / Destabilization of the Nuclear Landscape

X-EventThe Collapse of Everything Author: John L. Casti Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins


Journals Scan

For two consecutive days, 30 and 31 of July 2012, India experienced blackouts that took down large portions of the country’s power grid. The second outage was the largest in history, leaving more than 600 million people, nearly a tenth of the world’s population, with-out electricity. The blackouts brought renewed attention to the country’s power sector, which is struggling to supply India’s growing demand. They exposed weak links in the transmission system, inadequate fail-safe systems for preventing cascading failures, and a lack of proper outage planning.

Even when the grid is operating at peak capacity, more than 300 million people in India —more than in any other nation—still don’t have electricity. Demand for electricity will only continue to grow: India’s per capita electricity consumption was about 600 kilowatt-hours in 2009, leaving it far below the world average of 2700 kWh and behind regional competitors like China, where per capita consump-tion was around 2600 kWh.

When probing the reasons, an upgrade was at the heart of the July blackouts. It was found that two days before the first outage, the Power Grid Corp. of India took off-line one of the two transmission circuits near Agra, to upgrade it from 400 to 765 kV.

India’s power system is composed of five connected regional grids with four of the grids synchronized.

IEEE Spectrum The Magazine of Technology Insiders October 2012

X-Event 7: Running on Empty/ Drying Up of World Oil SuppliesX-Event 8: I'M Sick of it / A Global PandemicX-Event 9: Dark and Dry / Failure of the Electric Power Grid and Clean Water SupplyX-Event 10: Technology Run Amok / Intelligent Robots Overthrow HumanityX-Event 11: The Great Unwinding / Global Deflation and the Collapse of World Financial MarketsPart III: X-Events Redux


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Car is a critical resource and is undergoing far more rapid innovation. The automobile is currently the cleaner environmental performer per passenger mile (in the USA) compared with the bus. As we expect to move toward increasing energy efficiency for the private automobile, the car-bus comparison will increasingly favour the car, unless there is a dramatic upswing in off-peak bus ridership. The car is also not without its problems. In USA, it was associated with 369,000 deaths from 2001 to 2010. About 50% of its total life-cycle footprint is in its manufacture and another portion in

Traffic Technology International August/September 2012

The end of July is planting season for farmers in the northern states. But this year’s monsoon had delivered little rain, forcing farmers to rely on electric pumps to bring groundwater up from boreholes, thereby increasing the demand for power in northern region. The upgrade “should not have been done during the peak summer paddy season,” says experts.

This “load encroachment” caused the Agra line to trip prior to both blackouts, setting off a cascading failure.

Flexible AC transmission systems and dynamic compensation technology could have helped prevent the trouble.

This issue of Spectrum narrates in detail how an islanding scheme or microgrids could have dodged such large outages.Highlights of Contents: • Rise of the Robot Worker• The Universe in a

Supercomputer• Journey to the Centre of a

Tumour• Recommender Systems for

Online Merchants• 100-Gigabit Internet• India's Power Problems

• Signal Processors for Supercomputers

• Lobbying 2.0• Converting a Laser into

Handheld Laser Engraver• When Old Technology is

Better than New• What Kind of Connections

Foster innovation? [Source: EKL Knowledge Centre]


its disposal. Yet another larger problem that is wildly mismanaged is parking. The average car is parked more than 95 % of its useful life and the fully accounted carbon footprint of parking infrastructure far outweighs the aggregated footprint of all our automotive driving. Other countries are also not exempt from such situations. A detailed discussion of all the above aspects appears in this issue.Highlights of Contents:y� New York minutes: The great minds behind the Midtown in Motion

project reveal how it could speed up traffic and clean up the city that never sleeps.y� Indelible marks: How to raise awareness of cooperative systems that

could improve energy efficiency.y� Driven by distraction: Vision for the ultimate connected vehicle.y� Pilot for the future: Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Model

Deployment Programme.y� Studying for success: Research to improve traffic flow and air quality

information using near-real-time data from space.y� Terminal velocity: Strategies and technologies that could determine

the future of speed management.y� Poetry in motion: Adaptive real-time signal control.y� Sending out an SOS: Investigating virtues of eCall - a life-saving

technology with huge potential, slated for European deployment in 2015.y� State of play: Major car makers behind the push for an autonomous

future.y� Boom or bust? Economic and demographic complexities of traffic

forecasting for managed lanes.y� Smart cars: Clever moves being made in the connected vehicle

environment.[Source: EKL Knowledge Centre]

A Native American elder once described his own inner strug-gles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measure-ment anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

- George Bernard Shaw


Energy Lines

EKL Sudoku 72Solution

9 7 2 5 8 1 4 6 38 3 6 4 7 2 5 1 95 4 1 3 6 9 8 2 71 9 8 2 3 5 6 7 42 5 4 6 9 7 3 8 17 6 3 1 4 8 2 9 56 8 5 9 1 4 7 3 23 2 9 7 5 6 1 4 84 1 7 8 2 3 9 5 6

Mother Nature uses a multimillion-year process to produce crude oil which we refine to produce petroleum products for daily use. Phil Savage, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michi-gan and team have now come out with a process to "pressure-cook" algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 per-cent of the green slime into biocrude. They are trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil, with an ocean-going organism, green marine micro-alga of the genus Nannochloropsis. Shorter reac-tion times mean that the reactors don't have to be very large like con-ventional ones and the cost of building a biocrude production plant will also decrease. However, the process needs further development.

One of the advantages of the wet method is that it doesn't just ex-tract the existing fat from the algae - it also breaks down proteins and carbohydrates. The minute method did this so successfully that the

oil contained about 90 percent of the energy in the original algae.

Before biocrude can be fed into the existing refinery system for petro-leum, it needs pre-refining to get rid of the extra oxygen and nitrogen at-oms that abound in living things.

[For details: https://aiche.confex.com

http://www.theengineer.co.uk]

One-minute Biocrude From Wet Algae


Owned, Edited, Printed, and Published by N T Nair, 186, PTP Nagar, Trivandrum 695 038Printed by Akshara Offset, TC 25/ 3230(1), Vanchiyoor, Trivandrum 695 035

Published at Trivandrum. Editor: N T Nair

The Last WordTry to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought.

- Lawrence G. Lovasik

Executive Knowledge Lines monthlyRNI No. KERENG/2005/16316 Licenced to post without prepaymentPostal Regn. No. KL/TV(S)/316/2011-13 Licence No. CPMG/KL/TVM(S)/WPP-48/2011-13

executive knowledge lines november 2012

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